This afternoon I took a walk to the town hall, together with the woman from Hamburg and her daughter Stinchen, on whose account she had asked me to accompany them. It seems that Stinchen was a leader of some kind in the League of German Girls and is afraid of possible reprisals, which I’m supposed to ward off by speaking Russian. The widow joined us as well.
On the way we saw many people back on the street, hustling and bustling about – even a lot of men, though women there are still dearly in the majority. I even spotted one woman wearing a hat, the first I’ve seen in a long time.
Some guards had been posted outside a few of the banks I inspected with the sub lieutenant. Generally this meant two Russians with raised weapons. Definitely not the best way to attract customers.
Once again the town hall was like a beehive. We stood in the pitch-dark corridor and waited, surrounded by talk, the subject: pregnancy.
Yes, that’s one topic of interest to every one of us they managed to-get their hands on.
‘They say every second woman is pregnant,’ claims one voice.
To which another voice, a shrill one, replies, ‘Even if that’s true – surely for that you could go to anyone and have it taken care of.’
‘I heard that Stalin decreed that any woman with a Russian child gets counted as Group number I,’ says a third voice.
General laughter. ‘Does that mean that for group number I you’d…?’
‘Absolutely not. I’d sooner do something to myself.’ The widow poked me in the dark, trying to catch sight of my face. I didn’t want her to see me. I don’t want to think about that. This time next week I’ll know better.
‘Have you been to the hospital?’ The question went down the line.
‘No, what for?’
‘Haven’t you heard? They’ve set up an examination station for women who were raped. Everybody has to go. On account of venereal diseases.’
Another poke. I don’t know yet, I feel clean, I want to wait and see.
Everything went smoothly with Stinchen, of course: nobody asked about her glorious past. That’s another joke, the idea of punishing minors for participating in things with the complete approval of their parents, teachers and leaders. If our forebears once burned children as witches, and I’ve read that they did, it was at least because they thought the children had been possessed by grown-up devils, who were inhabiting them, using them as a mouthpiece. It’s hard to define at what age our western notion of responsibility for one’s actions begins to apply.
A woman from the building next door walked back home with us. She told us about a lady in a neighbouring apartment who had drunk and slept with the same Russian several times. Her husband, a clerk who’d been discharged from the Wehrmacht because of a heart condition, shot her from behind while she was at the kitchen stove, then took his pistol and shot himself in the mouth, leaving behind their only child, a girl of seven. ‘I’ve been keeping her at my son’s place for all this time,’ the woman explained. ‘I’d like to keep her for good. And I’m sure my husband will approve when he comes back. He always wanted a girl as well as a boy.’ The neighbours wrapped the parents in woollen blankets and quickly buried them in the courtyard, along with the pistol. ‘Good thing there were no Russians in the building,’ says the woman. No doubt there would have been a ruckus over the banned weapon.
We stood for a while in front of the graves on the grassy mound. The woman from Hamburg maintains that everything was bound to turn out this way – but if Hitler had been finished off on 20 July 1944, he would have kept some of his aura. Many people would have gone on believing in the dead man. Is he really dead now? Has he fled by plane? Escaped in a U-boat? There are all sorts of rumours, but no one is paying them much attention.
